


Another day, another disillusion

by Rabbit



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:05:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbit/pseuds/Rabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a prompt, "She pressed the bloody handkerchief to her mouth..." Cosette discovers that Marius carries love tokens everywhere, even to riots.</p><p>Originally posted about a million years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another day, another disillusion

She is neither laughing nor crying now. If any angel is hovering before her marital door he hasn't a finger over his lips, but a hand clenched firmly over his mouth, and is accompanied by two others: One covering eyes, one covering ears. There are things one doesn't want to know, particularly if one is a woman, thus superstitious and believing in ghosts.

Coincidences abound, have always abounded, in her life, beknownst or not to her. And her husband hasn't the slightest ability to lie, nor to keep things from her. He always tells her everything eventually. It is one of the things she loves about him.

So it is now, years from a dawn like night and a day that yawned like a great grey grave before a melancholy that to-day seems piddling. So it is, going through the bundles of rags to get a nappy for Petit Jean, that she finds the thing that starts it.

It is a handkerchief. There are rusty stains upon it--blood, certainly blood-- and the initials UF. She remembers a joke from long ago and knows it was in her husband's keeping, and wonders how it came to this ignominious end.

When she asks him about the stains he pales and stammers, and finally, he tells her about the girl. It is all very heartbreaking, and then he tells her the girl's name.

He is pale and loves her, does her husband, his concern for her expression encircles her but does not understand how deep the pond of memory goes, nor how big the pebble might be. For all she is shaken, neither does she, really.

She presses the bloody handkerchief to her mouth and tries to decide if she really, truly feels that Eponine deserved it.


End file.
